In August, I was eating dinner on my friend’s backyard patio when his next-door neighbor waved us over to the fence to say hello.
This neighbor buys the contents of abandoned storage units and sells whatever’s inside. To the uninitiated, my friend explained later, it might look like a mess — junk all over the yard, boxes piled up half-exposed to the elements. But to the right person, it’s inventory and a way to make a living.
He had just come back from his latest haul. Among his spoils in the grass outside were cardboard boxes, dirty and waterlogged. Christmas decorations, he said. If I didn’t want them, he’d throw them away.
“What’s inside?” I asked.
Ornaments, knick-knacks, a lot of Peanuts stuff, he said. Like the Charles Schulz characters. Oh, there’s a market for it. People collect that kind of thing. But he didn’t have the time to find them.
Four boxes ended up in the trunk of my car, but for the longest time, I couldn’t bring myself to open them. They felt heavy in a way that had nothing to do with how full they were.
It wasn’t until the leaves were already on the ground that I finally cleaned out my car and started going through the boxes. Inside was a whole story of a family I never knew, told through scores of orphaned keepsakes to hang on a tree. Some of the ornaments dated back to the ‘80s and earlier, etched with names and displaying photos. There were personalized stockings, a hand-sewn tree skirt (mildewed but carefully made), lots of broken bulbs, an old pinecone wreath, sleigh bells, towels and cloths, a complete nativity set and a gyrating, animatronic battery-operated Snoopy that played a warped, haunted holiday medley on a golden plastic saxophone.
Some of it I kept. Some of it was broken and too far gone to save, and I threw it away. The rest went into my basement, where it sat undisturbed until December approached.
As the streets outside began to transform into a picture print by Currier and Ives, it was time to decorate our house, and the boxes came back up. Our theme, I decided, was “Lost Christmas.” I thought it honored the family, in a way. The sleigh bells went on the front door and rang cheerily every time we had a guest. The nativity set went on the mantel. It was hand-carved wood; I think it was from the ‘60s. We put up our beloved artificial tree, and I told myself I’d hang all the ornaments on the branches. But I couldn’t do it.
I wondered if there was a chance anyone from the family they belonged to was still out there.
One of the boxes had a return address on it. I had seen it that first day when we packed everything in my trunk. I didn’t expect it to lead anywhere, but it was a place to start. I looked it up online, and that led me to an obituary. From there, I searched for the people listed as survivors. Many of them were gone, too, which led me to more obituaries. Eventually, I ended up on Facebook, searching names, looking for signs of life, where I found someone: a daughter living in Arizona. I scoured Google for contact information until I found a phone number. Then I called it.
To my surprise, she answered.
I explained everything — my friend’s neighbor who buys storage units, the boxes of Christmas decorations he didn’t want. I told her I wasn’t trying to scam her or sell her anything. I just wanted to return what belonged to her.
She was understandably skeptical. I sent photos.
She called me back almost immediately. “Those are our things.”
The storage unit, she explained through tears, had been paid for by a relative who’d gone down a dark path, stockpiling the things left from her late parents for themselves before passing away earlier this year. When the payments stopped, the unit was auctioned off before anyone in the family had been able to find a record of it. They thought it was all gone.
The woman from Arizona still had a sister living in Ohio, and she connected us. I packed everything away again, and the next day, I loaded the boxes back into my car and drove to meet her. After introductions, we stood in a driveway, strangers to each other, and without saying much, I helped her load everything into her car. Then we parted ways. Our Lost Christmas was over.
My people are all far away, and this was a tough year, so I’ll be staying local this week. But once the festivities end and the lights dim, when the house grows quiet, I’m sure I’ll return to my family’s old home movies again to revisit those early mornings around the tree, and to see the ones who are no longer with us.
As for our Lost Christmas, I couldn’t have asked for one better. All those memories from years gone by were just sitting in boxes. Now they will be passed on, as intended. To me, I consider this proof that love outlives us, that it’s still in motion on some strange journey home even after we’re gone. I hope that in the New Year, love reaches you even when you least expect it. Thank you for reading Farm and Dairy.
